What do you hear? The effect of stadium noise on football players’ passing performances

Abstract

Stadium noise – created by spectators and fans – plays a critical part in the reality of professional sports. Due to a lack of research on the impact of these auditory cues and multimodal environments on motor performance, it is currently unclear how professional athletes experience and perceive stadium noise and how this potentially affects performance in practice. In order to explore the effect of stadium noise on athletes’ performance, this paper presents an experimental design using the unique and standardised football training tool known as the “Footbonaut”. Specifically, fifteen skilled German football players engaged in a standardised football-specific technical training programme while subjected to four different auditory training conditions; these included both “positive” and “negative” stadium noise conditions, a “baseline” condition providing auditory guidance, and a “no (auditory) cue” condition. Performance data for passing accuracy and passing time were measured for training in each auditory condition. A repeated measures MANOVA revealed a significant main effect for passing time. Specifically, participants showed faster passing times in the baseline compared to the negative and no auditory cue conditions. Findings are presented and discussed from a constraints-led perspective, allied to principles of ecological dynamics and nonlinear pedagogy. Particularly, the use of representative training experiences (including multimodal sensory and emotional information) appears to underline training to refine expert athletes’ adaptive coordination of complex motor actions.

Keywords:

• Association football
• multimodal perception
• movement adaptability
• representative learning

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank both reviewers, the editor, and all players and students for their support, helpful suggestions, and comments to improve this paper. Further, we would like to thank TSG 1899 Hoffenheim (particularly Jan Mayer, Jan Spielmann, Adam Beavan, and colleagues) for being a leader of innovation and supporting and driving multi-disciplinary research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).